On this day in 1890, the United States Seventh Cavalry massacred dozens of Minneconjou Sioux beside Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota. With all the discussion of the Civil War and its causes, it’s worth taking a minute to think about the causes and meaning of the Wounded Knee Massacre, which many consider the last major engagement of the Indian Wars.

In fact, as far as the Minneconjou and other Lakota (or Western) Sioux were concerned, the war with the U.S. had been over for a decade by the time of Wounded Knee. Defeated, starving, and confined to shrinking reservations, some had taken up a ritual dance which visionaries announced would bring on the return of Christ and resurrect the dead. Dubbed ‘the Ghost Dance’ by a sensationalist press, the revival made some authorities nervous and so they ordered all Indians to cease dancing and report to reservation headquarters.

Thus it came to pass that a band of 350 Minneconjou Sioux (only 140 of whom were men) were on the road to Pine Ridge in late December of 1890. They were understandably nervous when they met 500 Seventh Cavalry troops sent to escort them. They grew more tense when Col. James W. Forsyth called all Indian men and teenage boys to a meeting and demanded that they surrender their rifles. Surrounded, the Minneconjous stacked up some guns for Forsyth, but he sensed they were hiding more. He ordered a search of their lodges.

It was at this moment that two soldiers seized a Minneconjou man who was refusing to hand over his gun unless they paid him for it. As the soldiers grappled with him, the rifle fired harmlessly into the air. The Seventh was Custer’s old regiment, a legendary Indian fighting outfit. But they had few veterans. They were mostly green. They were scared. They opened fire.

“It sounded much like the tearing of canvas,” recalled Rough Feather. “The smoke was so thick,” said White Lance, “I couldn’t see anything.”

Blasting from the perimeter (and in many cases shooting at each other), the soldiers exacted a dreadful toll from the largely defenseless Indians. Minneconjou men scrambled to their guns, returned fire, and soon broke through the Army cordon and headed to their lodges. At this point, the Army opened up with their Hotchkiss guns, which rained exploding shells at the rate of fifty per minute on retreating Indian men, women, and children.

Those who survived the slaughter fled to near-by relatives, or died in the numbing cold after nightfall. Back at Wounded Knee, bodies froze into grotesque positions. The Seventh Cavalry lost 30 soldiers. Indians in the single mass grave included 84 men and 62 women and children, although to this day the Lakota point out that many wounded died days later and far from the scene.

The massacre occasioned both adulation and recrimination. Some newspapers praised it. Eighteen Wounded Knee veterans received Congressional Medals of Honor.

But many Americans were uneasy with the slaughter. By 1890, most believed that Indians could be assimilated into American culture. The purpose of Indian Wars had been to ensure a society that was freer, richer, and kinder than the Indian communities it supplanted. To people who thought this way, Wounded Knee looked like an atrocity. Some saw the bloodshed as a blow against religious freedom. General Nelson A. Miles, commander of forces in the West and a veteran of many Indian battles, denounced Wounded Knee as “a general melee and massacre.” He would order two courts of inquiry into Forsyth’s conduct (he was exonerated), and conduct a lifelong campaign for congressional compensation of Wounded Knee survivors.

And what does it mean to Americans today? Wounded Knee reminds us that the Louisiana Purchase may look like a cheap land deal, but Napoleon did not have title to the property he sold. The moral costs of dispossessing the real owners were incalculably high.

The Civil War settled the question of whether or not there would be slavery in South Dakota and elsewhere. But what was the purpose of the Indian Wars? For Americans of 1890 the answer was easy: the U.S. took Indian land to make a better country. But today, that answer perhaps implies a responsibility that is hard to acknowledge. The modern United States tolerates enormous disparities in wealth, and descendants of Wounded Knee survivors have ended up, overwhelmingly, on the poorest side of the divide. Is the United States better than the society it replaced? One hundred and seventeen years after the Hotchkiss guns erupted at Wounded Knee Creek, the most troubling questions of that morning endure.

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23 comments

The problem with a site like this – and it is certainly not a problem for the blogger – is that it requires a participation that the average non-history professional, non-academic, or non-dedicated history buff just can’t afford. Can’t afford in time or often money.

That is not to say that an occasional stumble onto these type of sites is not valuable, it is just not something most people have the time to do on a regualr basis.

That reality is unfortunate. A people who do not know their history is doomed to repeat it. I think Truman said it last, but I do not know who said it first. Worse, with out a knowledge of where we have been, when we go astray it is hard to get back to the place where we began to depart from the path to our original destination.

I am linking to your site, and will finally get on topic, but I wanted to just mention that I have a full day taking care of my family and running my small business doing web design. What I read is usually current because we are in a time when we are going dramatically astray, and are very close to taking up a new path of oppression, economic ruin, and desolation.

There has always been in the American character (I use the arrogant classification of American to describe the people living in the United States, with apology to Canada, Mexico, and the countries of Central and South America.) a warrior mentality. It seems to be in most all of mankind. The idea that one can control how another man believes and acts through violence in at the heart of our current problems.

It is today in Foreign Policy as it was then in Domestic (or at least Continental) Policy with the American Indian wars and Slavery. While the two topics of the Native Americans, who were not a single people but a group of Tribal Nations who had their own Wars, and the Slaves. who were imported and kept enslaved, differ in the particulars, they are part of the same story of how an oppressor is oppressed by its own oppression.

Violence beget violence. It is unavoidable.

When apologists for the war try to say that the fact that more of our people die in car accidents in a given period than die in Iraq or that people die in violence in America just like Iraq, they expose their blindness to the fact that it is all the same violence.

We need to deal with who we are a people. While we say beautiful words like all men are created equal, we need to search our souls to rid ourselves of ideas that allow us to believe that one set of humans or another do not deserve to join in that equality.

The Indians or Native Americans did not. Negros or Blacks did not and all to often do not. For many United States Americans, Mexicans do not. Certainly we do not beleive Illegal Aliens do not, when History shows us many of them are just returning home, and the others are coming to collect on the assets of Fruit and Vegtables that were stolen from them.

Only when we truly believe the words that made us free, shall we be free. Only when we deny violence a hold on our lives shall be able to join in rejoicing “Free at last, Free at last”.

American Exceptionalism, the circular argument that it cannot happen to us, because we are (well) us, also begets an attitude that we cannot possibly do ‘that’ because, well, we’re us and we never have done ‘that’. We’re Americans, for God’s sake.

And yet, the price of freedom is vigilance. Constant. Vigilance. Which, on this sober anniversary, means we are called to reject the misconception that we as a people are not capable of atrocity, of genocide, of tyranny; history, sadly, teaches otherwise.

The lesson of history is that we are to stand alert and view our conduct with sober, objective and clear lenses, for while we are capable of greatness if sufficiently motivated, we are also disposed of great evil if merely complacent.

It’s not clear to me that Warren is saying the MoH’s were for Wounded Knee; just that 18 veterans of Wounded Knee received the award. But maybe I’m parsing too closely.

If it was, in fact, the former, then it strikes me as an antecedent to the current practice on the Right of not only not being embarrassed by their criminals and failures, but of celebrating them. (Liddy, North, Abrams, Libby, DeLay, Lott, etc. and so on and so forth.)

Thanks, Hank. That’s a good idea. I’ll work on something more elegant for the future. But for now, I’ve set off Louis’s writing by placing a title and byline between my introductory paragraph and his text. I hope that helps.

If the medals weren’t FOR Wounded Knee then the language is ever-so-slightly misleading, as the statement is offered as an illustration or proof of the preceding statement that the massacre occasioned “adulation” and “praise.”

Also, I’m curious about whether its best to talk of the expectations being that the dance “would bring on the return of Christ and resurrect the dead.” This isn’t a sceptical, rhetorical question–I’m wondering how much Christian theology the Sioux were blending into their belief systems at the time? I sent the article to a friend who’s area is American religion, and who also teaches the West, and he WAS skeptical about that characterization. Me, I just know what I’m told.

We’ll see if Louis shows up to weigh in. I think his characterization, based on what I know, is pretty accurate. The research he has been doing is pretty amazing. Again, I’ll see if he’ll come address the issue himself.

And yeah, the HBO Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is a train wreck. Actually, it’s much more boring than a train wreck. Too bad, really, as the book deserves more serious treatment. Not reverential, mind you, but not shlock.

Thanks to Hank, Charles, Urbino, Roy and everybody else who has weighed in for all the insightful comments and helpful queries. Let me clarify some of the ambiguities in my post. Yes, the medals were for Wounded Knee, a fact that has riled many critics over the years. You can read about it at http://woptura.com/, or at http://www.dickshovel.com/WKmasscre.html#Medals

Not to justify or rationalize the awards, but it might be of interest to know that the Medal of Honor was different in 1890 from what it is today. The award was created in 1862 to honor soldiers for the Union. It was the only decoration awarded by the U.S. Army until 1918. Consequently, it was awarded for many things, not necessarily for uncommon valor but also for “soldierly qualities” including being especially helpful or following orders. Today it is the nation’s highest military award, and the requirements for winning it are much stricter. All that said, critics of the Wounded Knee awards point out that the roll of Medal of Honor winners lists more honorees for Wounded Knee than for any other engagement, including D-Day.

As for the Ghost Dance: yes, there was a considerable amount of Christian theology entangled in the Ghost Dance, although how much depended on the particular believer. Some believed that Christ had returned to earth as an Indian. Others said the dead would rise but Christ was not on the scene. Importantly, many, perhaps most Lakota were skeptical of all these claims and leery of the Ghost Dance altogether. You can read about the Christian elements of the Ghost Dance in James Mooney’s classic account, THE GHOST DANCE RELIGION AND SIOUX OUTBREAK OF 1890. There was enough Christianity in the Ghost Dance for one correspondent to characterize the events of 1890 this way: “[N]o sooner had the news of the coming Saviour reached the ears of the Great Father at Washington than he ordered his soldiers to the frontier to suppress the worship of any Indian who should pray to his God after the dictates of his own conscience.”

As Anthony Wallace and Gregory Dowd have argued, Christianity has effected Native American religions as far back as Handsome Lake; particularly in the calls for following “the true path of light” in reforming one’s life. This route was also traveled by Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee Prophet, who even incorporated repentance.

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